Review

It almost feels like JC Chandor is showing off. In what is only his second feature film, after the chalk-and-cheese financial collapse movie “Margin Call," he sets himself a kind of exercise in filmmaking rigor, in the bare-bones, one-man survival-at-sea story “All Is Lost” and delivers. From the st...

Let’s get one thing out of the way: “Epic,” the latest from Blue Sky Studios (the “Ice Age” films, “Robots” “Horton Hears a Who” and “Rio”) is at times breathtakingly beautiful. The Chris Wedge-helmed feature presents a visual step-up for Blue Sky and we are luckier for it. The film features a rich ...

A strangely chimeric movie, that only reveals its truest colors in its closing moments, James Gray’s “The Immigrant” which screened In Competition this morning in Cannes is a meticulous reframing of the director’s familiar themes and concerns that mostly lived up to our high expectations, while neve...

We've all known people like Nancy. The title character of Andrew Semans' "Nancy, Please" is a real pill, dark eyes, slumped shoulders, and an eternal pout. There's always drama in Nancy's life, and she's always expressing it physically. She's always impetuous, always difficult, and frequently nasty,...

Why do we watch movies? No, really, why is it? As close an answer as we’ve ever come to for our own, fairly evident obsession with what we consider the greatest storytelling medium humankind has ever developed, is well, that life is short. Bear with us a second on this: basically to submerge yoursel...

What happened at the cliffhanger ending of 2004's "Before Sunset?" Did Jesse (Ethan Hawke) manage to catch his flight back to the United States or did he and Celine (Julie Delpy) finally re-consummate their nine-year-after-the-fact romance? These questions are answered in Richard Linklater's trilogy...

There’ve been great masses of critical laurels laid at Alexander Payne’s door over the years, some, in our eyes, more earned than others. When it really hits home, the director’s quiet humanism and wry humor can yield perceptive insights, especially into certain trademark areas of expertise: family ...

“When I saw his movie,” said director Jim Mickle in his opening thank you to Jorge Michel Grau, the director of “Somos Lo Que Hay,” “I was jealous of everything: the idea, the plot, the style, and jealous that it was playing at Cannes in Director’s Week.” And so Mickle went about securing the rights...

Titles can be sticky, none moreso than “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.” The “we” mentioned could be speaking in first-person perspective in regards to the muckracking online collective, which helped power the biggest security breach in government history. Then again, is the story of WikiL...

With the weight of expectation behind it, Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives” was never going to be able to deliver the same neon blue jolt of surprise that thrilled through the 2011 Cannes crowd at the first screening of “Drive.” But the audience in attendance today was prepped and primed, a...